Snyder T. The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. 384 p

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in Poland, or indeed only in Poland and western Ukraine. Between  and

, , individuals identiﬁed as Ukrainians were sent to central or eastern

Ukraine. , were resettled to Western Ukraine.

Operation Vistula reset-

tled , individuals within Poland. In quantitative terms, Operation Vis-

tula concerned less than a quarter of the Polish citizens resettled as Ukrainians.

More people were sent to central and eastern Ukraine than to western Poland:

they too faced adjustments to a new situation, and in almost every respect their

situation was worse.

Whereas Ukrainians who remained in Poland remember , Poles reset-

tled from Volhynia and Galicia remember the slaughter by Ukrainian partisans

of  and . To be sure, the barbaric mass murder of Polish civilians by the

UPA in Volhynia in  and Galicia in  was one of the most terrible

episodes of the war. Polish survivors and their families almost always regard the

UPA as a band of murderers. Survivors found themselves dispersed throughout

postwar Poland, under a communist regime that did not acknowledge their

memory, since discussions of lost prewar territories were taboo. Polish survivors

also bore a tremendous share of the national humiliation ﬂowing from the col-

lapse of the civilizing mission in the east, an idea once as essential to Polish na-

tional identity as the frontier was to the American, or the empire was to the

British.

These Ukrainian and Polish memories are different in substance: they con-

tain contradictory accounts of events, and different heroes and villains. They

are similar in form: both speak of the destruction of ways of life, and of the

compulsion to begin anew. Consider, one after the other, a pair of Ukrainian

and Polish recollections. “No one ever dreamed that such a great Ukrainian

village, which shone with Ukrainian life, could be in such a short time, in

such a brutal, barbaric way, torn from the surface of the earth.” “Volhynia

aflame, the glow of the flames, I see it still and I cannot rid myself of it, I can-

not forget it. What happened in Volhynia will remain in my memory to the

end of my days.”

Historical disagreements regarding –, about who

started the conflicts and who suffered most, flowed from different definitions

of groups, borders, and periods. Ukrainians rightly think that Polish groups

struck first in most areas of what became postwar Poland. Poles rightly think

that the OUN-Bandera’s decision to destroy the Polish element in what be-

came western Ukraine began the entire cycle. Ukrainians rightly believe that

more Ukrainians than Poles were killed on territories now in Poland: about

eleven thousand Ukrainians to about seven thousand Poles. Poles rightly be-

lieve that, taking into account all contested territories, Poles were killed in

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

204

greater numbers: about seventy thousand Poles to perhaps twenty thousand

Ukrainians.

SOCIAL MEMORY AND MODERN NATIONALITY

It does not deform the facts, today, to link these human recollections and body

counts to opposing Polish and Ukrainian memories, which correspond to the

two modern nationalisms that prevail in Poland and western Ukraine. At the

same time, it is important to see that terrible events which are recalled today of-

ten clariﬁed the national identity of the Poles and Ukrainians who retell them.

The perspective of  was tremendously different than the perspective of

. Teenagers and adults who cleansed each other during the s were once

children who (sometimes quite literally) played together in the s. The rec-

ollection of the Volhynian Pole “Waldemar Lotnik,” who took part in the fero-

cious mutual cleansings of late  on the Polish side, is typical: “But it was

with Ukrainians that I spent most of my childhood, learnt to read and write,

skated on frozen lakes in winter and discovered shards of Russian and German

ammunition, left over from the First World War, in the forests and ﬁelds...”

He does not say so, but he certainly spoke Ukrainian with these children.

The very way “Lotnik,” and others like him, lived to tell the tale deﬁes the

presumption of inborn national traits, gives the lie to cultural deﬁnitions of na-

tional identity, and alerts us to difference between prewar and postwar accounts

of nationality. Lotnik—a Pole telling a very Polish story, remember—would

have been killed at several points had he not been a native speaker of Ukrainian

and Russian. He owed the “nine lives” of his memoir’s title to the fact that he

spoke languages other than Polish. At one point, he almost perished because his

eastern accent in Polish caught the ear of a savvy Red Army ofﬁcer looking for

deserters. Some Polish children escaped death in Volhynia in  because they

spoke Ukrainian with Ukrainian children they played with, and could say their

prayers in Ukrainian when stopped on the road by strangers. Volhynian Ukrai-

nian families who wished to save Polish children taught them the Lord’s Prayer

in Ukrainian. Although we have seen that religion served as a marker for puta-

tive nations, and that churches sometimes provided havens for national ac-

tivists, this was the ﬁrst moment in which religion mattered chieﬂy as a sign of

nationality for societies in general. If one deﬁnes modernity as the period when

nationality counts for more than religion, modernity begins in Volhynia and

much of Galicia in the s.

We know of these cases of survival from the memoirs of survivors. For obvi-

Communism and Cleansed Memories

205

ous reasons, the circumstances of death are harder to specify than the circum-

stances of survival. There are nevertheless enough cases of mistaken identity

leading to murder in  and  to conﬁrm the general idea that nationality

was by no means transparent—even to nationalists. In an atmosphere of mu-

tual mass murder on national grounds, people made incorrect judgments that

led to horribly absurd deaths. The Poles who surrounded the Galician village of

Zubrza in summer  wished to take revenge on the Ukrainian nation by

killing Ukrainians. The village’s ﬁve Poles were not convinced that these un-

known attackers were really Poles: local Poles apparently thought the armed

outsiders were an UPA brigade, masquerading as Poles to reveal the village’s

Poles. In accordance with this reading of the situation, these ﬁve Poles pre-

tended to be Ukrainians. Their calculation was wrong; the attackers really were

fellow Poles. The ruse was successful; their fellow Poles took them for Ukraini-

ans, and killed them. In a matter of life or death, both killers and victims were

unable to recognize members of their own nationality.

Southeastern Poland in  admitted similar ambiguities. The very way

Operation Vistula was prosecuted and resisted reveals the falsity of simple ac-

counts of clearly distinguishable “Poles” and “Ukrainians” in conﬂict. In May

, for example, the Polish regime created a false UPA brigade, composed of

speakers of Ukrainian, in an attempt to draw the OUN leader from his bunker.

A meeting was arranged. But the disguise worked all too well: on its way to the

rendezvous, the Polish “UPA” unit was mistakenly attacked by Polish security

forces. Incidentally, even the real UPA soldiers who arrived in time to watch

this transpire could not tell that the false UPA brigade was not one of theirs. In

a separate incident one month later, a real UPA unit escaped encirclement by

the Polish army by striking up a popular Polish revolutionary song (“When the

nation takes the ﬁeld, weapon in hand . . .”) and singing its way through Polish

lines. Ironies such as these were a product of ethnic cleansing and a sign that it

was incomplete; the success of ethnic cleansing meant the beginning of the end

of such surprises.

Ukrainians cleansed by Operation Vistula in  sometimes spoke better

Polish than the Poles cleansed from Volhynia by the UPA in : but when

these groups met in the Recovered Territories of northern and western Poland,

people usually “knew” who was the Pole and who the Ukrainian.

Politics and

memory trumped observable cultural traits such as language. This is not to say

that Lemkos and Ukrainians could not pass as Poles: tens of thousands of them

did. The point is that by  everyone accepted that nationality was unitary

and exclusive, that individuals were of exactly one nationality. Eastern Poles

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

206

and Ukrainians resettled in western Poland often had a great deal in common,

at least in contrast to the natives around them: but a new “eastern” culture con-

spicuously failed to emerge.

Only in the most extreme situations did such

similarities tell. A Volhynian Pole recalled, as his single positive memory of hav-

ing Ukrainian neighbors, a reciprocated invitation to Christmas dinner and the

fresh ﬁsh UPA veterans somehow procured—in the Siberian gulag. Christmas

dinners were important occasions to both Poles and Ukrainians before the war,

and reciprocal invitations were not uncommon in the s. It took Siberia to

reproduce such cordiality in the s.

The Polish state reinforced felt divisions, and supported a modern concep-

tion of Polish nationality. The very chaos and mobility of the postwar period

helped in this project. When a ﬁfth of the prewar population has been killed, a

quarter of all villages have been destroyed, a third of the population has been re-

settled or moved from somewhere else, and one half of the cultural centers

(Lwów and Wilno) have been lost to foreign rule, local loyalties count for less

than they would, and recent memories for more than they might. Detailed

study of the years after  demonstrates that the very process of creating a

working class in Poland involved the making of a Polish working class nation-

alism.

But individual experiences during the war provided much of the ma-

terial with which the state worked, and were often sufﬁcient in and of them-

selves.

Both ends of the gun are transforming: there is perhaps no experience

so nationalizing as to have been both cleansed and cleanser. Such people have

something to remember and something to forget, something to grieve and some-

thing to justify.

SIMPLIFICATION AND NATIONALIZATION

We can see the triumph of modern nationality in communist Poland on the ex-

ample of regional groups. “Volhynians” are now counted among the most forth-

right of Polish nationalists: not at all the case before .

Lemkos (or their

children and grandchildren) are now part of Ukrainian civil society in Poland:

again, something unthinkable before the war. Nationalism is now the main cur-

rent in Ukrainian political life in Poland, which had never previously been the

case. Recall too the tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants who proﬁted from

the slaughter of Poles in Volhynia, or the tens of thousands of Poles resettled to

southeastern Poland after Operation Vistula. Volhynian Ukrainians who today

refuse to speak of annihilated Polish villages, like Polish priests who today de-

stroy Ukrainian cemeteries in southeastern Poland, smooth out the past.

Communism and Cleansed Memories

207

What happened to villages full of wrinkles, such as Dobra Shl’iakhets’ka/

Dobra Szlachecka? After six centuries of existence as a distinct local reality, and

after decades of relative indifference to modern ideas of nationality, Dobra was

transformed almost beyond recognition between  and . In – the

Soviets deported Ukrainians they accused of “collaborating” with the interwar

Polish state. In – the Germans murdered most of the Jews. The Ger-

mans also sent Ukrainian national activists and communists to Auschwitz. In

– the UPA murdered Ukrainians it found uncooperative, and Poles it

suspected of “collaborating” with the new regime. On  January  a Polish

army battalion found a UPA brigade in Dobra: the UPA escaped, and the army

killed twenty-six inhabitants of the village. The Soviets resettled half of the sur-

vivors in , the Polish regime the other half during Operation Vistula in

. Eighty villagers were interned in the concentration camp at Jaworzno; a

Dobra woman gave birth there.

In Dobra, as elsewhere, the violent application of ascriptive deﬁnitions was

divisive. Those who found the body of the fourteen-year-old boy murdered by

the UPA for collaboration were, we may assume, never quite the same. This

must also hold for the twelve-year-old girl who watched Polish soldiers murder

her father on Christmas Day. It would be too much to say that Dobra was na-

tionalized by the war: neither was it free of national activism before the war, nor

are its surviving former residents all committed Ukrainians or Poles. We can

safely maintain that experiences of war closed early modern possibilities of self-

identiﬁcation, and activated more modern ones. Since modern nationality car-

ries with it a certain lexicon, one of the closed possibilities is easy description of

a lost reality in our postwar idiom. Today, the terms “Polish” and “Ukrainian”

impose themselves upon survivors’ stories even as they hasten to add that these

terms meant something different before the war.

The fate of Dobra Shl’iakhets’ka/Dobra Szlachecka, terrible as it was, seems

lyrical when compared to that of Polish settlements in Volhynia obliterated in

. Recall the fate of Gle˛boczyca, discussed in chapter . The UPA decision to

kill everyone in such places left even clearer images in the minds of the sur-

vivors. One Gle˛boczyca boy, having spent the night in the family stable, awoke

at dawn on  August  to see his father surrounded in the ﬁeld by Ukraini-

ans. One of the Ukrainians struck his father (age ﬁfty-six) in the back of the

head with a sickle; his father dropped to his knees, then, convulsing, fell for-

ward and died face down in the soil. The boy watched as his mother (age forty-

three) ran, screaming, towards her dying husband. She was ordered to stop and

did, a Ukrainian took aim and shot her, and then another killed her with a blow

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

208

from a sickle as she lay on the ground. A Gle˛boczyca girl returned home that

morning to see her neighbor’s head rolling on the ground, a child killed by hav-

ing its head beaten against a pillar, and other villagers murdered with pitchforks

and sickles. She crept towards home in time to see her eleven-year-old sister

beaten to death. The rest of her family were already dead.

Poles ﬂed Galicia

with similar memories. Hucisko, a Polish village south of L’viv, was destroyed

by the UPA on  April . A local woman returned to ﬁnd men hanging

from trees, their skin hanging from their muscles, their hearts torn from their

chests. Other men, women, and children, dead on the ground, were burned

and mutilated beyond recognition. She was able to identify her young son’s

ruined body only by the bread she had packed in his pocket earlier that day.

In this light, it is striking that Polish survivors of the Volhynian and Galician

terror sometimes make the sorts of distinctions in their memoirs that are worn

away as their names become numbers and their stories become histories.

In-

delible personal memories, with time, contributed to national forgetfulness.

To attend to individual memories is to see the false elements of national mem-

ories, but also the collective suffering which makes coherent myths inevitable.

Even when victims of ethnic cleansing preserve a sense of ambiguous identity,

as is sometimes the case, or have nuanced stories to tell, as is often the case, their

accounts are invariably reduced to their most common and most terrifying ele-

ments as they circulate within a national society. Retellings and rewritings erode

and reﬁne. The transformation of places such as Dobra (which still exists in Po-

land), and even more the obliteration of Polish settlements such as Gle˛boczyca

and Hucisko (which would now be in Ukraine if they existed), removed barri-

ers to the creation of simpliﬁed national histories.

Deportation prepared the way for myth by privileging nation over locality.

Individuals were deported on the basis of Nazi or Soviet identiﬁcation docu-

ments with nationality categories issued after , although these documents

may not have reﬂected a modern national identity. Be that as it may, the expe-

rience of deportation conﬁrms national identity not only by its ethnicizing im-

plementation, but by its sociogeographical consequences. In –, Poles

and Ukrainians alike were resettled into areas which were alien at the level of lo-

cality, but familiar at the level of nationality. A Lemkini who ﬁnds herself in

L’viv after the Second World War will know little of urban life, but she will

know to pray in some of the local churches and how to speak the Ukrainian lan-

guage (after a fashion). A Volhynian Pole resettled from L’utsk to Gdan´sk will

have never seen the sea, but he will be a Roman Catholic and speak a Polish

comprehensible to most of the people around him. In new surroundings, “na-

Communism and Cleansed Memories

209

tional” characteristics such as religion and language come to the fore. Deporta-

tion creates lowest-common-denominator nationalism.

COMMUNIST AND NATIONALIST HISTORY

A few years after Operation Vistula had resettled Poland’s Ukrainians, Polish

archaeologists discovered the sarcophagus of Prince Danylo, ruler of Galicia

and Volhynia in the thirteenth century.

Because the dig was on the Polish side

of the border, near the contested city of Chelm/Kholm, it was not made pub-

lic. Polish communist authorities needed to prevent the perception of “Ukrain-

ian” settlement in “Poland”—seven centuries in the past. This Polish concern

ﬁt Soviet practice. After all, in schoolbook history, the Soviet Union was “de-

scended” from medieval Kyivan Rus’, whereas communist Poland was “de-

scended” from the medieval Poland of the Piast dynasty. Poles and Russians

were taught that their “ethnic groups” had stood in place for nine hundred

years, awaiting the proper political and territorial realization of their “nation-

hood.” Ukrainians were told that that Kyivan Rus’ was a Russian state, and that

their forebears rebelled against Poland because Ukrainians yearn for Muscovite

rule.

The “descent” of modern communism from medieval duchies and king-

doms allowed communists to sidestep the half-millenium of Polish cultural ex-

pansion to the east (from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of

the nineteenth) and the political success of the Polish-Lithuanian Common-

wealth (–). The Commonwealth was a troubling example of many

things Soviet communism wished to abolish: constitutional traditions, repre-

sentative institutions, cooperation among Poles and East Slavs, and intellectual

ﬂexibility and political toleration in the realm of nationality. Ukrainians who

reject the substance of the Soviet reading of Ukrainian history often accepted

its form. To believe that Ukraine rather than Russia “inherits” Kyivan Rus’ also

risks neglecting the heritage of the Commonwealth. Of course, Poles who

thought of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as “Polish” in the modern

sense were also wrong. The Commonwealth was Europe’s largest early modern

realm, governed by early modern Europe’s largest citizenry, the noble nation.

As early modern nationality was reconstructed in the nineteenth century, it be-

got a brood of modern nationalisms intent to discover separate origins in a

more distant past. This trend in nationalism informed communists and their

opponents in the twentieth.

This communist idea that ethnic nations were stable entities with durable

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

210

boundaries threw shrouds over interesting problems of modern history. For ex-

ample, the complicated pattern of the assimilation of Polish-speaking peasants

to Ukrainian culture (and vice versa) in interwar Galicia and Volhynia is now of

only specialist academic interest. For most, these people were always (or at least

always destined to be) what they eventually became. Now that Volhynia and

eastern Galicia have become western Ukraine, both Ukrainians and Poles have

forgotten just how different these regions were once considered to be. Sepa-

rated by the Russian-Austrian border for more than a century before , kept

apart by Polish policy between  and , divided between Soviet and Nazi

occupation regimes between  and , and then between the Nazi Reichs-

kommissariat Ukraine and the Nazi Generalgouvernement between  and

, these regions are today the heart of a rather unproblematic “Western

Ukraine.” Galician Ukrainians today sing “My Volhynia” under L’viv’s Habsburg-

era gaslights as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Most important for the emergence of modern from early modern national-

ity is the new signiﬁcance of religion. Between the Brest Union of  and the

end of the First World War, Greek Catholicism and Orthodoxy were rivals. As

a result of Russian and Austrian imperial policy, eastern Galicia was predomi-

nately Greek Catholic, and Volhynia predominately Orthodox at the begin-

ning of the twentieth century. The union of Galicia with Volhynia within in-

terwar Poland created the opportunity for Galician Ukrainians to propagate

modern nationalism on Volhynian Orthodox territory. They had some success

in the s and s, and great success during the Second World War. In the

ethnic cleansing of Volhynia in  we must see not only the removal of Poles,

but an alliance of Greek Catholics and Orthodox against Roman Catholics. It

was part of the creation of a western Ukraine in which differences of religion

between Greek Catholicism and Orthodoxy mattered less than identiﬁcation

with the Ukrainian nation. It closed an early modern divide between religions

by solidifying the modern divide between nations.

The same can be said of southeastern Poland. In the framework of the early

modern Commonwealth, or early modern Polish civilization, Greek Catholi-

cism was a partner of Roman Catholicism. As early modern nationality suc-

cumbed to modern, this association perished along with it. The ethnic cleans-

ing of southeastern Poland was not only an action taken against Ukrainians by

Poles, but an action taken by Roman Catholics against both Greek Catholics

and Orthodox. Postwar Poles accept that the Greek Catholic and Orthodox

Churches were both Ukrainian. In the s, for example, the Polish mayor of

Przemys´l, once largely Greek Catholic, claimed that Ukrainian culture was

Communism and Cleansed Memories

211

more foreign to him than Eskimo culture. To anyone who knows Przemys´l/

Peremyshl or Poles and Ukrainians, nothing could be more absurd: except per-

haps the behavior of some of the townspeople. They physically occupied a local

church that Pope John Paul II wished to return to Ukrainian Greek Catholics.

The beneﬁciaries of their action, Roman Catholic Carmelite monks, then pro-

ceeded to destroy the church’s dome on the grounds that its “eastern” shape de-

stroyed Przemys´l’s “Polish” skyline. Here again religion is subordinated to

modern nationalism, and common early modern civilization is obscured rather

than revealed. The Habsburg-era dome was in fact modeled not upon an east-

ern basilica (or an igloo), but upon St. Peter’s in Rome.

NATIONAL HISTORY AS COMMUNIST

LEGITIMATION

We can see the progress of modern nationality on the example of individuals as

well as towns, regions, and religions. Wojciech Jaruzelski, for example, was of a

family loyal to Pilsudski’s early modern, federalist conception of nationality. In

, young Captain Jaruzelski was ordered to resettle Ukrainians in Operation

Vistula. Captain Jaruzelski believed that Operation Vistula was about the Pol-

ish army protecting the Polish state. Jaruzelski was taught to see the UPA as

Nazis. Throughout the postwar period, the Polish regime justiﬁed its general

Ukrainian policy by this association. There was something to it, of course. The

UPA in Volhynia ordered former German policemen, collaborators in the Final

Solution, to murder Poles. The UPA in Poland incorporated Waffen-SS desert-

ers as well as German policemen, and learned from the German occupation.

The UPA was part of an organization, the OUN-Bandera, which was ideologi-

cally committed to ethnic purity. Poles are right to remember all this: but they

forget that the UPA was successful in many of its endeavors because its causes

were speciﬁcally Ukrainian ones, and its organization equal if not superior to

that of any Polish institution operating on Polish territory. The Polish regime’s

association of Ukraine with Germany allowed Poland to reﬁght the Second

World War on better terms in . It also shrouded the extent to which the

Polish regime’s own rhetoric and policy were redolent of the German occupa-

tion. General Mossor, commander of Operation Vistula, spoke of a “ﬁnal solu-

tion” to the Ukrainian problem. Operation Vistula exploited German identity

documents and a German concentration camp.

Operation Vistula meant that the communist regime could and did speak of

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

212

a Polish “national state.” Although this could not quite be said, the creation of

a Poland for the Poles was a great legitimating achievement of Polish commu-

nists.

Of the four major changes which made it possible to speak of Poland as

a “national state,” the Holocaust went largely unmentioned, the expulsion of

Germans was treated as reason to be loyal to the Soviet Union, the “repatria-

tions” were a Soviet operation, and only the ﬁnal cleansing of Ukrainians re-

mained as a local Polish achievement.

Even during the reforms of the Gomulka

period (–), the Polish regime directed attention to the two wartime en-

emies, the Germans and the Ukrainians, and to its success in keeping them at

bay. In , ofﬁcial anti-Semitism was deployed by those who challenged Go-

mulka, and by those who defended his position. In November and December

, the leading political weekly commemorated the ﬁftieth anniversary of

Poland’s independence by asking the country’s leading intellectuals to com-

ment on changes in the “typical Pole.” None of the respondents questioned the

essential identiﬁcation of the “typical Pole” with the ethnic Pole. Only one sug-

gested that in the creation of an ethnically homogenous polity something had

been lost.

After a generation of communism, by let us say , only a modern concep-

tion of nationality functioned in Polish society. A Pole was at once a citizen of

Poland, an ethnic Pole, and (in all likelihood) a Roman Catholic. Far better than

interwar Poland, communist Poland spread the national idea by extending ed-

ucation and promoting social mobility. After a generation, and in conditions of

political rapprochement, the sense of the German threat began to decline in

about . At the same time, the fear of Ukrainians in Poland remained steady.

Indeed, the peak of ofﬁcial anti-Ukrainian ideology was during the Gierek era,

the s, as Poland was ofﬁcially declared ethnically homogeneous.

In  and , Gierek and then his successors were forced to contend with

Solidarity, an independent labor union and then a mass social movement with

as many as ten million members. While Solidarity was unquestionably a patri-

otic movement, its leaders evinced a very different attitude to Ukraine. During

the months of relatively free speech, intellectuals spoke of the impossibility of

Polish independence without Ukrainian independence. The Solidarity labor

union sent its greetings to the nations of the Soviet Union, a gesture appre-

ciated in Ukraine. As Polish communists sought to discredit Solidarity, they

emphasized its support for equal rights for Ukrainians in Poland. Finally, in

December , Solidarity was crushed by martial law. General Wojciech Jaru-

zelski, now general secretary of the Polish party, head of the Polish state, and

Communism and Cleansed Memories

213